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The Impact of Justice Scalia’s Death on the Bob McDonnell Case

Justice Scalia’s death could end up spelling prison time for Bob McDonnell.

Scalia’s unexpected death over the weekend is a watershed in the legal community. Whether they agreed with him or not, few would deny that Scalia was a towering intellectual force on the Supreme Court for the past three decades. He was an aggressive and witty questioner from the bench, who almost single-handedly made Supreme Court oral arguments a lot more interesting. His elegantly-written and sometimes caustic opinions were eminently readable and could send many of us scurrying off to Google obscure terms such as “jiggery-pokery.” He had a tremendous impact on the Court and on the law.

But — this being Washington — Scalia’s body was not yet cold before people moved past the tributes and started debating the political and legal implications of his demise. President Obama and Senate Republicans promptly squared off over whether Obama should appoint a successor and whether the Senate would act on the nomination if he did.

There was also a good deal of commentary about how Scalia’s absence from the Court might affect the outcome of major cases pending in areas such as affirmative action, abortion, the Affordable Care Act, and the President’s powers on immigration and climate change. The loss of a single Justice can have a great impact because it opens up the possibility of a 4-4 tie. When that occurs, it is as though the Supreme Court case never happened. The lower court opinion stands and the Supreme Court’s decision has no value as precedent.

For former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, that’s a worrisome prospect. McDonnell and his wife Maureen were convicted on multiple counts of corruption back in September 2014. Prosecutors charged that the Governor and his wife agreed to use the power of his office to benefit a businessman, Jonnie Williams, by promoting his dietary supplement product within the state government. In exchange, Williams gave the McDonnells secret gifts and no-paperwork “loans” that totaled about $170,000. Following their convictions, Bob McDonnell was sentenced to two years in prison and Maureen was sentenced to one year and one day.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously affirmed McDonnell’s conviction, and the full court declined to re-hear the case. But this past January, in a move that surprised at least some observers, the Supreme Court agreed to hear McDonnell’s appeal. The case likely will be argued in April and decided near the end of the Court’s term in June. (Maureen’s appeal in the Fourth Circuit is on hold pending the outcome of Bob’s case; the legal issues are virtually identical and whatever happens in his case will almost certainly determine the outcome of hers.)

A 4-4 Supreme Court tie in McDonnell’s case would mean the Fourth Circuit opinion upholding his convictions would stand – and that would mean the former Governor, and almost certainly his wife, would soon be heading to prison.

The McDonnell case, like all others currently pending, now faces this possibility of an equally-divided Court. But when it comes to McDonnell, Justice Scalia was not simply one of nine Justices. If I had to pick the one Justice on the Supreme Court most likely to be sympathetic to McDonnell’s arguments, it would have been Justice Scalia. Whether in the majority or in dissent, it’s a safe bet Scalia would have had something to say about McDonnell’s case – and it’s almost certain it would have been good for McDonnell.

Justice Scalia – A Likely Champion for Bob McDonnell

Justice Scalia was a leading voice on the Court in the area of white collar crime. He wrote the majority opinion in a number of important cases and powerful dissents in others. Consistent with his overall judicial philosophy, when it came to white collar crimes he typically argued for a strict interpretation of the statutory language and objected to any judicial “glosses” or expansive interpretations that arguably went beyond the literal words of the statute.

McDonnell’s “big picture” argument to the Supreme Court is that the government’s interpretation of federal corruption laws is too broad and potentially criminalizes a great deal of protected political activity. Justice Scalia’s overall approach to the law suggests he would have been sympathetic to this claim.

But even beyond issues of general judicial philosophy, Justice Scalia had previously staked out strong positions on the particular statutes McDonnell was convicted of violating — positions that would have directly supported McDonnell’s legal theories:

Official acts: From day one, a centerpiece of McDonnell’s legal defense has been the definition of “official acts” contained in the federal bribery and gratuities statute, 18 U.S.C. § 201. That statute defines an official act as “any decision or action on any question, matter, cause, suit, proceeding, or controversy” that may be pending or may be brought before the public official. McDonnell claims that favors he did for Williams, such as introducing him to other government officials or suggesting to state researchers that they study Williams’ product, were not “decisions” or “actions” on matters pending before McDonnell that would fall within this definition. Accordingly, he says, they cannot form the basis of a bribery conviction.

McDonnell was not charged with violating § 201, which generally applies only to federal officials. But he and his supporters have claimed that the language of § 201 governs all federal corruption laws, including those he was convicted of violating: the Hobbs Act and honest services fraud. I think this is wrong, for reasons that I’ve detailed in earlier posts here and here. But the claim remains the heart of McDonnell’s defense and is central to his Supreme Court appeal.

In support of their interpretation of the term “official act,” McDonnell and his supporters rely primarily on the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in United States v. Sun-Diamond, which involved the appeal of Sun-Diamond’s conviction for paying gratuities to Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy. In the course of its opinion, the Court discussed the definition of “official act” and pointed out that it was deliberately narrow. The Court noted that some routine political events, such as the President hosting a winning sports team at a White House reception, would not be “official acts” under this definition because they would not involve decisions or actions on matters pending before the President.

Sun-Diamond was not a bribery case and its discussion of “official acts” was not central to the Court’s decision. Nevertheless, McDonnell and many other public corruption defendants routinely cite this portion of the Court’s opinion to argue that their conduct in a bribery case did not amount to official acts and thus cannot be punished.

And who was the author of the Sun-Diamond opinion? Justice Scalia. He also famously remarked in that same opinion that in an area as complex as public corruption, where there are many different statutes and regulations concerning the intersection of law and politics, “a statute . . . that can linguistically be interpreted to be either a meat axe or a scalpel should reasonably be taken to be the latter.” (He did know how to turn a phrase.)

Scalia’s view that the federal bribery statute must be narrowly construed would be directly in line with McDonnell’s position. McDonnell claims his conviction threatens all routine political interactions and that if it stands a politician could not attend a fundraiser (or host a team at the White House) without fearing a potential prosecution. He argues that fundamental First Amendment rights of political association and expression forbid this, and that the federal corruption statutes must be more narrowly tailored.

With his claim that all federal corruption laws should be interpreted by using a scalpel that would carve out a safe zone for his own actions, Governor McDonnell almost certainly would have found a sympathetic audience in Justice Scalia.

Honest Services Fraud: One of the two principal corruption statutes under which McDonnell was convicted is honest services wire fraud. In an honest services fraud case, a politician is charged with defrauding his constituents of their right to his fair and honest services by using his public office to line his own pockets.

In an important 2010 case, Skilling v. United States (involving the conviction of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling), the Supreme Court addressed Skilling’s argument that the term “honest services” was so vague and amorphous that it rendered the statute unconstitutional. The majority disagreed. The Court held that honest services fraud should be limited to cases involving bribery or kickbacks, and that so construed the law was sufficiently clear. Because Skilling’s conduct involved neither bribery nor kickbacks, his convictions for honest services fraud were reversed.

Justice Scalia (joined by Justices Thomas and Kennedy) wrote an opinion agreeing with the final outcome but not with the analysis. Scalia agreed with Skilling that the phrase “honest services” is hopelessly unclear. He criticized the majority’s decision, arguing that narrowing the law to only bribery and kickbacks “requires not interpretation but invention.” Justice Scalia wrote that he would reverse Skilling’s convictions on the ground that the honest services law was unconstitutionally vague.

Bob McDonnell is arguing that honest services fraud requires proof of “official action” that goes beyond anything he did for Williams. But as an alternative, McDonnell claims that if honest services fraud is construed to apply to his conduct, then that law is unconstitutionally vague.

As noted above, Justice Scalia likely would have agreed with McDonnell about the need for a narrow concept of “official action” in a bribery case. But beyond that, Scalia had already written an opinion agreeing with McDonnell’s fallback argument that the honest services statute is so amorphous that it violates the constitution.

Justice Scalia was a long-standing and ardent critic of the honest services law. There’s little doubt he would have been solidly in McDonnell’s camp when it came to the challenges to McDonnell’s honest services fraud convictions.

Hobbs Act: The other corruption offense of which McDonnell was convicted was Hobbs Act extortion. As I wrote in an earlier post here, this is a somewhat unusual corruption law. The Hobbs Act applies to more traditional extortion by force or violence, but also to extortion “under color of official right.”

In the landmark 1992 case of Evans v. United States, the Supreme Court held that Hobbs Act extortion under color of official right requires only that a public official accept something of value knowing that it is being given in exchange for some exercise of official power. At common law, the Court said, extortion under color of official right “was the rough equivalent of what we would now describe as ‘taking a bribe.’”

Justice Thomas dissented in Evans – in an opinion joined by Justice Scalia. He argued that extortion and bribery are distinct crimes and that the majority’s opinion obliterated that distinction. Extortion under color of official right, he claimed, could not be committed by simply passively accepting a bribe; the public official had to induce or demand the payment under the wrongful pretense that he was entitled to it by virtue of his office.

Justice Thomas also argued that the Court’s interpretation of the Hobbs Act improperly opened up for federal prosecution a wide array of corruption crimes that traditionally had been prosecuted by the states. This federalism argument – that the federal government should not lightly assume jurisdiction over possible state and local corruption offenses – is also one of McDonnell’s claims, and is one to which Justice Scalia would have been sympathetic.

Last fall I attended the Supreme Court oral arguments in another Hobbs Act corruption case, Ocasio v. United States. Although it was not directly at issue in that case, I recall Justice Scalia, within the first few minutes, expressing his skepticism about the proposition that the Hobbs Act applies to routine state law bribery. When counsel noted that this was the holding of Evans, Scalia replied, to laughter, “I dissented, I assume.”

When it comes to the second pillar of McDonnell’s corruption convictions – Hobbs Act extortion – Scalia again was on record disagreeing with the prosecution’s legal theory. He almost certainly would have sided with McDonnell in his challenges to the Hobbs Act charges.

Of course, there’s no way to know for certain what impact Justice Scalia’s absence will have on the final outcome in McDonnell’s case. It may be that McDonnell was going to lose anyway – it only takes four Justices to grant certiorari, but it takes five to reverse. Or it may be that he is destined to win or lose by a wider margin, where Scalia’s vote would not have tipped the balance.

But a 5-4 decision in McDonnell’s favor seemed like a real possibility. If that had happened, one of those almost certainly voting in the majority – and very possibly writing the opinion – would have been Justice Scalia. If that was destined to be the outcome, Scalia’s death means there will now be a 4-4 tie – which means the McDonnells will likely be going to prison.

The Supreme Court has lost one of its strongest, most consistent, and most articulate conservative legal voices. But the McDonnells have lost their most likely champion among the Justices. The impact on the outcome of their cases could be profound.